Please welcome my good friend and fellow erotic romance author KD Grace, she's chatting about the fabulous serial that's been popping up on her website lately and I know I for one, am hooked!
First off, I’d like to thank the lovely Lily Harlem for
having me over for a chinwag. It’s always such a pleasure to spend time at
hers. When Lily asked if I’d do a post, I said yes for a different reason.
Usually I’m blogging to promote whatever novel I’ve just put out. I said yes
because I’m doing something really, really fun, and I was excited for the
chance to talk about it.
A few months ago, I made the decision that it was time to
have more fun with my writing, time to try something different. For the past
five years I’ve never had a moment when I wasn’t working to a tight deadline,
and that was while trying to keep up with the PR and marketing for the books
I’d already written. That’s the position we writers love to be in, always
having our work in demand, but it sometimes means we fall into a rut and live
very tunnel-visioned lives. It also means that projects we’d love to do,
projects that are dear to our hearts never get done.
Writing has been a pleasure all of my life. In fact,
writing has been THE pleasure of my life, second only to sex, and that’s
probably because the two are, in my mind, very closely related. The pure
pleasure of writing has always come from the creative force unleashed by the
imagination. My characters, more often than not, take me in directions I
totally wasn’t expecting to go, and they control the stories I write. As
frightening as it is to give over the reins, the results are always exciting
for me, and for the reader.
There are always other stories I want to write, other
characters whom I’d met in previous novels that I want to spend more time with.
I promised myself that it was time to throw caution to the wind and let that
happen. For me that meant playing with story on my blog, doing stories
especially for the blog, experimenting with creativity in my posts, and writing
another serial.
The first serial I wrote was Demon
Interrupted, which I did in episodes that came out every three weeks. I
completed it last Halloween. (You see what I did there? J) The character I wanted to know more about was a secondary
character, who caught my attention in my Lakeland Witches
Trilogy. I wanted to know Ferris Ryder’s story. It was the most fun I’d had
writing in ages! Writing a serial is such a different animal because of the
episodic nature, and each time I sit down to write an installment, it’s like
sitting down to a new adventure, very immediate, very spontaneous.
After Demon
Interrupted, my life got consumed by projects with deadlines, projects that
I got paid for and my intentions to write another serial were put on hold.
Until four weeks ago. I got bold and decided to do a weekly serial based on a
short story I wrote ages ago, that had been through many incarnations, but
never ended up quite like I wanted it to because there was way more happening
than I could explore in ten or twenty pages. Voila! In
The Flesh, the serial was born!
What I love most about writing a serial for my blog is that
it’s a chance for me to completely let the Muse lead me on a weekly basis.
Also, I really love the fact that it’s something I can give my readers, a
little guilty pleasure every Friday, sort of a literary nooner. In a way
they’re looking over my shoulder as the story unfolds.
In The Flesh is very dark paranormal erotica. When Susan Innes comes to visit
her friend, Annie Rivers, in Chapel House, the deconsecrated church that Annie
is renovating into a home, she discovers her outgoing friend changed,
reclusive, secretive, and completely enthralled by a mysterious lover, whose
presence is always felt, but never seen, a lover whom she claims is god. As her
holiday turns into a nightmare, Susan must come to grips with the fact that her
friend’s lover is neither imaginary nor is he human, and even worse, he’s
turned his wandering eye on Susan, and he won’t be denied his prize.
Excerpt:
Long toward morning I woke with a start. The room was awash
in the scent of roses, and I was certain someone had called my name. “Annie?” I
half whispered. There was no reply, no sound other than the anxious breathing
that must surely have been my own. Surely. The pitch black of the room pressed
in all around me like another presence, so close that I felt if I switched on
the light, I would suddenly come face to face with it. The bile of panic rose
in my throat. I threw off the duvet and fumbled for my phone, dropping it on
the mattress before I could finally slice the blackness with a sliver of light.
The drop cloth curtains trembled on either side of me, no doubt from my own
panicked actions, and the smell of roses thickened.
Careful to keep the sliver of light, I slipped into my robe
and hurried to check on Annie. Even in the stairwell I could hear her moans. As
I neared the transept the air felt charged and heavy like that moment in a
storm just before lightning strikes. The hair on my neck rose and goose flesh
prickled up my spine. I held my breath as I tiptoed closer. The plastic drop
cloths had been shoved onto the floor in a heap, and there in the moonlight she
lay, thrashing atop the altar, her hair splayed like a halo around her head,
her nightie pushed up over her hips. She arched her back and cried out,
reaching her arms upward to something I couldn’t see.
I wanted to
run, but instead, I stood frozen, bathed in cold sweat, waiting for logic to
explain everything away, as the moonlight around her seemed to explode and
coalesce with her ecstasy. The smell of jasmine, Annie’s favourite flower,
cloyed at my throat making my headache. After what seemed like an eternity, the
urge to flee finally took control. Heart pounding, I stepped back, hoping to
leave unnoticed, when suddenly I felt a rush of wind against my face and
breathed the musky odour of sex. I stumbled backward, unable to hold back a
small yelp. My phone slipped through my fingers and skittered under a pew as
the scent of jasmine gave way to roses.
In the heavy press of darkness, I half ran, half fell down
the hall back toward my room, tripping over the edge of a drop cloth thrown
across the floor and coming down hard on both knees with a breathless curse. I
pulled myself to my feet gasping for oxygen, groping at the wall for the
electrical switch, desperate for light – any kind of light. Though I was
disturbed by what I had seen, I was more disturbed by the fact that it had
aroused me even through my fear. As my eyes adjusted, light coming in from the
small window in the door of the makeshift kitchen bathed the room in monochrome
grey. Another gust of wind blew the door open with a loud crash. I yelped and jumped
forward to force it shut. Then I could have sworn I heard my name again, called
out with such longing that I couldn’t stop myself. With hands slippery from
nervous sweat, I fumbled the door open again and stepped out onto the patio.
The clutter of Terra cotta pots looked like strange squat specters in the dance
of moonlight and shadow. Making my way past derelict strawberry jars, several
bags of ancient compost and wheeless wheelbarrow, I immerged into a large
garden over grown with weeds. It was the deconsecrated churchyard, I reminded
myself with a shiver. In the bright moonlight, I stood holding my breath.
Listening.
Annie had taken twisted pleasure in speculating about the
graveyard that had once been the back garden. She had imagined exhumed medieval
skeletons taken to the London Museum to be studies and cataloged. She had
imagined underground catacombs where ghosts of priests and and murderers alike
scurried on secret missions, some sinister, some holy. I shivered at the
thought and pulled the robe tighter around me. I had not found her speculation
amusing then, and I found it even less so now. I found nothing about this place
amusing. Fighting my way through a tangle of ivy I came to a stone bench that
looked like it well might have belonged in a graveyard. Not wanting to go back
inside Chapel House, I sat down, hoping desperately that if I thought long
enough I’d find a rational explanation for everything that had happened or I’d
wake up and discover it had all been a bad dream. Staying in places with
intriguing pasts often brought me unsettling dreams.
I could smell roses again -- old roses, not any sort of
modern hybrid. Only old roses would smell so strong and so sweet amid the rank
growth of weeds. As I breathed in the scent that seemed to be coming from just
over my shoulder, I felt a humid breeze on my neck, brushing my nape, like
breath exhaled with the settling of a kiss. The leaves rustled around me, and
the bench was suddenly in shadow. With a start, I turned to hear the sound of
footsteps retreating down the path. “Annie? Hello?” I clamoured to my feet and
followed the rustle of leaves, the scent of roses always just ahead of me.
“Annie, this isn’t funny, alright? This isn’t funny!”
I hadn’t remembered the garden being so large. It felt as
though I wandered the paths for hours. My spine constantly prickled, but a
quick glance over my shoulder always revealed no one following me. The paving
stones were mossy and slick beneath my bare feet. I stumbled along ignoring the
scratch of bramble and the sting of nettle, shoving my way through leaves damp
with dew until I broke through, as though I’d just pushed aside a curtain. With
a gasp, I stopped short, nearly losing my footing on the moss.
The smell of roses was overwhelming. The sense of not being
alone crawled along my spine on little insect feet. In a small copse set
between aging lilac bushes taller than my head and a gnarled hawthorn hedge
that might have once been apart of a formal garden, he loomed over me. I
swallowed back a scream just before it could escape, just as I realized he was
an angel, or at least a statue of one.
Slightly more than human size, his weathered marble toes
barely touched a low plinth, as though he were just alighting. One large hand
was extended in invitation toward me, the other rested on his naked chest over
his heart. A billowing veil of stone just covered his groin so that his perfect
form, all but the most intimate of it, shown silver in the moonlight, frozen in
a motion of welcome, muscles tensed in anticipation, empty eyes locked on mine.
With my heart battering my ribs, I stood unmoving, stone
cold, as though I were his marble counterpart. I know this sounds crazy. And
even after so much time has past, it still sounds crazy every time I think of
it, and yet I knew then, just as certainly as I know now that something
ancient, something primal, moved over my skin, like the brush of spider webs
and dust motes, fingering its way deeper, into secret places, places in myself
where even I never dare go. Whatever it was, it knew me, it understood me, and
its longing for me was terrible.
*****
The recent short stories, ‘journal entries,’ and In The Flesh, along with Landscapes, a story I wrote for the
wonderful m/m collection, Brit Boys: On Boys are
all tied into a bigger project linked with my present WIP and the world it
involves. I’m having fun on a grand scale, and sharing it with my readers as I
go.
Thanks again for having me, Lily! Always a pleasure!
About K D Grace/Grace
Marshall
Voted ETO Best Erotic Author of 2014, and a proud member of
The Brit Babes, K D Grace/Grace Marshall believes Freud was right. In the end,
it really IS all about sex, well sex and love. And nobody’s happier about that
than she is, otherwise, what would she write about?
When she’s not writing, K D is veg gardening. When she’s
not gardening, she’s walking. She walks her stories, and she’s serious about
it. She and her husband have walked Coast to Coast across England, along with
several other long-distance routes. For her, inspiration is directly
proportionate to how quickly she wears out a pair of walking boots. She also
enjoys martial arts, reading, watching the birds and anything that gets her outdoors.
KD has erotica published with SourceBooks, Xcite Books,
Harper Collins Mischief Books, Mammoth, Cleis Press, Black Lace, Erotic Review,
Ravenous Romance, Sweetmeats Press and others.
K D’s critically acclaimed erotic romance novels include, The Initiation of
Ms Holly, Fulfilling the
Contract, To
Rome with Lust, and The Pet Shop. Her paranormal erotic novel, Body Temperature
and Rising, the first book of her Lakeland Witches trilogy, was listed
as honorable mention on Violet
Blue’s Top 12 Sex Books for 2011. Books two and three, Riding
the Ether, and Elemental
Fire, are now also available.
Find K D Here:
